Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Morehouse School of Medicine, a historically Black medical school in Atlanta, Georgia, received $950,000 in federal funding to create a new academic and research building, which will greatly expand the HBCU’s future research, education, and workforce development opportunities for faculty, staff, and students.
Alabama A&M University received a $150,000 grant from the Alabama Law Foundation to launch the “Civil Rights and Justice for All” initiative in partnership with the Judge James E. Horton Jr. Legal Learning Center. The project will provide structured experiential learning opportunities for students majoring in pre-law, political science, and criminal justice at the HBCU’s College of Business and Public Affairs. Over the next three years, students will design and host one campus-wide program each semester, focusing on topics surrounding constitutional rights, due process, and civic responsibility.
A team of faculty members with the College of Veterinary Medicine at historically Black Tuskegee University has received a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to help poultry processors identify contamination risks earlier and improve food safety management across the production continuum. With research support from scholars at Cornell University, the University of California, Davis, Michigan State University, and the University of Illinois, the project will deploy GenoPATHx, a rapid molecular detection platform with machine learning-based predictive tools to enable detection and forecasting of Salmonella in poultry processing plants.
As part of a $69 million grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to Duke University, North Carolina Central University received a $10 million sub-grant to convert medical research into better health outcomes. Supporting multiple projects in roughly a dozen departments across the HBCU, the grant will be used to expand existing community engagement efforts and create new initiatives focused on translating evidence-based discoveries into public health programs.
Jennifer Wyatt Bourgeois, postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Justice Research at historically Black Texas Southern University, was awarded a $100,000 grant from the Fund for a Safer Future to support her research on firearm deaths among people recently released from incarceration. The three-year study will examine how factors like untreated mental health conditions, substance use, housing instability, and prior trauma contribute to gun violence deaths during the critical first year after release. Results from Dr. Bourgeois’ research aim to provide key insights for gun violence prevention programs, reentry services, and public health agencies.
